Festival History

Ojai is home to many arts festivals, including the Ojai Shakespeare Festival, the Playwriting and Storytelling festivals, and the famous Ojai Music Festival, featuring the Los Angeles Philharmonic, performing under the stars and stately live oaks of Libbey Park since 1947. A small group of volunteers created the first Ojai Poetry Festival in the same outdoor venue in May of 2003. The success of that event prompted us to plan festivals here every other spring. Join us every two years for two days of outstanding poetry and conversation in an idyllic natural setting.

It was a dark and rainy night in the winter of 2000 when two Minnesotans, after too many glasses of wine in the Garden Terrace restaurant, agreed that Ojai would be the perfect place for a poetry festival. Jim Lenfestey, a writer from Minneapolis who was spending the winter months in Ojai working on a screenplay, said he knew Robert Bly, lived across the street from him in Minneapolis in fact, and was sure he would agree to come. And several glasses of wine later, I agreed to coordinate the details from the Ojai end. I had recently retired to Ojai from Minnesota, where I had managed large-scale software implementations. How hard could a poetry festival be? Robert Bly! This would be fun!

On that evening, I don't think we envisioned anything more than Robert Bly reading some poems and translations, but in the ensuing months, as word got around town, and after Robert agreed to come, we realized that it had to be more. Ojai angels turned up to help: Gael Belden, the late Stan Brown, Tom Lowe, Hope Frazier, Judy Oberlander, Susan Karst, Wayne Flaaten and others. Jim returned to Minnesota and worked with Robert Bly to focus the festival around the poetry of Rumi, the 13th Century Persian mystic. He negotiated contracts with poets Coleman Barks and Jane Hirshfield to participate in what was to become Poetry and This World of Uncertainty, and suddenly it started to feel like the big time.

And after almost two years of planning, the first "show" opened on May 16th 2003 with Jane Hirshfield reading on the stage of Libbey Bowl. It was a balmy evening and Jane's quiet voice was accompanied by Spring peepers - oh yes, and the Friday night rock band at the Athletic Club. A volunteer was hurriedly dispatched along the trail to the club to plead for quiet, and to our amazement the rock music stopped. The poetry gods must have been smiling on Ojai that night, and the evening became a magical fusion of poetry and music under the stars.

After the huge success of the first festival, we decided it should be a biennial event to allow enough planning time to bring in top caliber poets. The bar had been set pretty high. In 2004, another angel appeared in the form of Tami Haggard who agreed to coordinate the next festival in 2005. That year the theme was What Times Are These...? and the festival brought veteran poets, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Galway Kinnell, and newer voices, Suzanne Lummis and Joy Harjo, to Libbey Bowl for a second successful festival.

The 2007 festival is titled Poetry and the Voice of the Earth, and on May 18th and 19th Gary Snyder, Sherman Alexie, María Meléndez and Sandra Alcosser will add their voices to the prestigious roll of poets who have participated in the Ojai Poetry Festival. I know that, as in the past, it will be a transformational weekend.

A festival doesn't happen without a lot of work and support from volunteers and the community. Many, many thanks are due to all those whose efforts have kept this a growing festival of poetry for Ojai.

Linda Silver
Co-Founder

Jim Lenfestey

Linda Silver